Alternative ways of adding pumpkin

I've made a pumpkin beer the past two years. First one turned out pretty good. Last year.... not so much. I'm scrapping that recipe entirely and starting over this year.

One problem I ran into last year was a stuck sparge because of the canned pumpkin. I'm lazy, and doing a whole pumpkin is too much work so I'm brainstorming how to get by with canned pumpkin but not have a stuck sparge. I've got two ideas so far. Both involve putting the canned pumpkin in a paint strainer bag:

1. Put the bag in the mash, and just take it out and put it back in whenever I stir. Take it out before sparging.

2. Put the bag in the kettle with the mash water at high 160ºs for an hour or so. Take out and fill mash tun with the pumpkiny water. Put the bag back in and let it soak in the sparge water for an hour. Sparge with pumpkiny water.

Do either of these sound like they would work? Has anyone tried either of these before?

How bout option three. Just add it to the boil? We're discussing this already today in THIS thread.

I did almost exactly that last year. I was tired of the 3 to 4 hours stuck sparges. I heated my mash water to I 175ish and added the pumpkin. I let the canned pumpkin soak in the mash water over night in a spare cooler, I did I give it a stir every few hours before I went to bed. The next morning I syphoned the pumpkin water off the solids that fell to the bottom and mashed in as usual. The beer turned out great, the best pumpkin beer I ever made.

Thanks for the reply, frogman. Did you use whole pumpkin or canned? I'm hoping to brew my pumpkin ale on August 7th or 8th. I'll be sure to post my results.

Just curious, did you guys use rices hulls?